Tip: Measure Your Cabinets Before You Buy New Dishes

Or, perhaps, measure your existing dishes before you buy cabinets for a new kitchen.

We've noticed that, in all of the apartments we've lived in, the standard cabinetry is too shallow for our dinner plates. Open shelving to the rescue...

These plates are about 11 1/2 inches wide, and our cabinets are just a 1/4-inch shorter.

We don't mind seeing our plates out in the open. They are used daily, so it's not as if they collect dust, and we kind of like the convenience of having them ready-to-go, on the way to the dining table. But we might have chosen some slightly smaller ones if we'd known they'd never fit in standard cabinets, even if we wanted them to.